Shoo, Fly: How to Get Rid of Fruit Flies Once and For All

You're gathering up your scraps from the kitchen counter and open the garbage can to toss them, when streaming out of the garbage come tens of fruit flies. Those pesky buggers are irritating, gross and never-ending multipliers, so it's understandable that you'd want them out of your house (or at least kitchen, for the love of Pete). Here are some tips from Houzz and research entomologist Eric Jang to rid your workspace once and for all from fruit flies.

Preventing Fruit Flies

Seal your doors and windows. No, the flies aren’t spawning magically in your home. The flies enter your home from the outside when you open a door, or through poorly sealed screens on your windows. Or, if you like to buy overly ripe fruit, it could already have fruit fly eggs in it when you bring it home from the grocery store. The point is, it’s important to make sure your home is properly sealed — no splits in window screens, for example.

Put a lid on compost bins. To control fruit flies in your house, it’s best to cover the odors of ripening fruit. This means, among other things, keeping a lid on your compost bin. Jang says in Hawaii, many homeowners use an empty and cleaned-out 2-quart container for ice cream. “You can even use contact paper to make it nice looking,” he says. “But the point is to minimize exposure, so you want to keep the lid on and take the compost out regularly and bury it at least 6 inches deep in your compost pile.”

Cover fruit bowls and plates. As for fruit bowls, Jang recommends fine mesh covers that go right over your bowl, or using glass containers. The latter is a bit more decorative, as shown in the photo here, but you can find domed mesh covers in different colors for just a few dollars each.